In episode #9, Tarek Slimani and Rishabh talk about how he achieves customer success and some insider tips on beating poor product usage.
I think it’s important to understand and realise that someone has to own it and with customer success, we have a lot of empathy. We have a great perspective in understanding how to serve it the right way.
I think it actually comes down to serving it in the right ways. Churn is an outcome of many things and what a good CSM can do is mediate expectations with both the company and the clients to ensure a smooth journey where they continue to achieve continuously. But it’s the overall company responsibility to make sure that the churn is low.
One thing I would say is, As a high impact on churn is onboarding and the first initial value with the customers. We focused on having a proper support practice which sounds ridiculous because you don’t want to be reactive but proactive.
In order to be proactive, you need to start with being reactive so establishing a proper support practice where you can be as productive as possible includes creating content like videos for the users and then make sure to have a proper high touch onboarding. Identify where you have the repetitiveness to scale these activities to include adoption later on.
One of the most important things is feedback and how you utilise that feedback in the process with the whole company because the most important thing to reduce churn is to understand the client’s needs. The best way to do that is by talking to them.
We have interactions through onboarding, support and through adoption and retention. Therefore the feedback that we get helps in understanding the client’s needs which is extremely important. The way that is served to the product teams is going to be the deciding factor in my humble opinion.
How good retention will be with the company level because in order for you to achieve high returns you need to have a good product that the customers can achieve value from. So, most often I see the reasons for why they don’t achieve value or end up leaving the companies is because there’s typically always something that they’re not able to achieve later on if their initial value was achieved and they had some different decided value that they needed to achieve later on.
And it’s really important for the customer success managers to know how to take that feedback and then present it to the product team. This is a broad topic so I’m quite passionate about that and also because I had to learn the hard way. You cannot always just note down feedback and serve it and then someone will listen to you.
One thing I think is key for customer success managers is that they should realise early on, how do you present this feedback, how do you present your ideas in a way that no one can ignore you. It comes down to understanding how to communicate the outcomes of financial value.
So if we implement or now we’ve heard this piece of feedback and feature requests a bunch of times, if we don’t implement it, then it will potentially cause an increase in churn and this increase in churn will cause our growth numbers to be lower. And if our growth numbers will be lower, we will have a bad quarter which will reflect poorly upon our funding round.
So if you can communicate the financial or the numbers based on the impact that the feedback has then I think someone will listen to you because whenever you compare product feedback from a customer success standpoint in sales standpoint, it’s always the sales because they can show the dollars that the product or the companies tend to focus on instead of focusing on what is a good customer experience.
How can a good customer experience reflect positively or negatively on the numbers so that someone will actually listen and include this piece of feedback to help you increase retention rates and reduce churn in the long run?
